DSpace at VNU: Beginning EFL teachers' beliefs about quality questions and their questioning practices

Obaidul Hamidb* aUniversity of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi,Vietnam;bSchool of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Rec

On: 04 October 2014, At: 01:14

Ly Ngoc Khanh Phama & M Obaidul Hamidba

University of Languages and International Studies, VietnamNational University, Hanoi, Vietnam

b School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane,Australia

Published online: 22 May 2013

To cite this article: Ly Ngoc Khanh Pham & M Obaidul Hamid (2013) Beginning EFL teachers’ beliefs

about quality questions and their questioning practices, Teacher Development: An internationaljournal of teachers' professional development, 17:2, 246-264, DOI: 10.1080/13664530.2012.753947

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2012.753947

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Beginning EFL teachers ’ beliefs about quality questions and their questioning practices

Ly Ngoc Khanh Phamaand M Obaidul Hamidb*

aUniversity of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi,Vietnam;bSchool of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

(Received 15 October 2011;final version received 23 November 2012)

Motivated by the scarcity of research that examines the impact of teacher beliefs

on their actual practices in Vietnam, this study investigated the relationshipbetween teachers’ beliefs about quality questions and their questioning behav-iours in terms of questioning purposes, content focus, students’ cognitive level,wording and syntax Thirteen beginning EFL (English as a foreign language)teachers working at Vietnam National University participated in the study Qual-itative data collected by means of an open-ended questionnaire survey and class-room observation were analysed using qualitative content analysis Findingsshow that although there was a general congruence between teachers’ beliefsand practices, there were discrepancies– from moderate to substantial – betweenwhat the teachers believed and what they actually did in the class with respect

to the four specified features While much more research is required to stand the links between EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices about quality ques-tions in Vietnam and other EFL contexts, it is expected that the insights willcontribute to the literature on teacher questions, beliefs and practices

under-Keywords: teacher beliefs; teaching practice; quality questions; English as aforeign language; beginning teachers; Vietnam

Introduction

Teachers’ beliefs have a significant influence on their classroom practices Pajares(1992) indicated that in challenging circumstances it is their beliefs, more than theknowledge they might have received from training, that guide their teaching Thisrelationship between teacher beliefs and practices has been under scrutiny through anumber of studies in different disciplines over the past several decades For exam-ple, Ernest (1989) conducted a study on mathematics teachers; Hedrick, Harmon,and Linerode (2004) explored teachers’ beliefs and practices in vocabulary instruc-tion; and Palak and Walls (2009) investigated teachers’ beliefs and technology prac-tices In second language (L2) teaching, Basturkmen (2012) reviewed 17 studies, all

of which dealt with correspondence between teacher beliefs and practices

However, it would be remiss if teachers’ beliefs and practices are notexplored in relation to their questioning behaviours given the importance of tea-cher questions in classroom discourse (Brualdi 1998; Cullen 1998; Long andSato 1983; Walsh 2011; White and Lightbown 1984) Although there has been

*Corresponding author Email: m.hamid@uq.edu.au

Vol 17, No 2, 246 –264, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2012.753947

Ó 2013 Teacher Development

some research on teacher questions in L2 teaching (e.g Breen et al 2001;Brock 1986; Cundale 2001; Mitchell 1994; Thornbury 1996), not many studieshave investigated the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and their practiceswith a focus on teacher questioning Moreover, this research is scanty in EFL(English as a foreign language) countries where English is increasingly becomingdominant in their education systems In response to the need for research on therelationship between teachers’ beliefs and questioning practices, the studyreported in this paper examined EFL teachers’ beliefs about quality questionsand their actual questioning behaviours in the EFL classroom in Vietnam Theempirical insights are expected to add to our understanding of the belief–practicerelationships in the EFL class.

Since 1986, when Vietnam adopted the economic liberalisation policy, and,more recently, in the wake of globalisation, English teaching has spread widely

in the country The putative role of English in human capital development in aglobalised world (see Hamid and Honan 2012) led to the adoption of Communi-cative Language Teaching (CLT) in Vietnamese tertiary education including theUniversity of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University(VNU), where the present study was located CLT classrooms usually aim atmeaningful communication which requires the use of referential and clarificationquestions, rather than display questions (Cullen 1998; Cundale 2001) However,Vietnamese teachers and students are likely to aim at retention of knowledgeand prefer display questions because memorisation is highly valued in the localacademic culture (Lewis and McCook 2002) Moreover, under the influence of agrammar- and reading-based examination system, Vietnamese teachers usuallytest students’ recall and give them practice drills Therefore, the present studywould shed light on whether the principles of CLT have had an impact on tea-cher questioning practices in the EFL class

Teachers’ beliefs

Until the mid-1970s, beliefs as well as thinking processes had been overlooked byresearchers under the influence of behaviourist psychology (Xing 2009) However,Fenstermacher (1978) predicted that the study of beliefs would be the focus of tea-cher effectiveness research, marking a shift in the educational research paradigmwithin which teachers are now considered decision makers, not merely doers(Cundale 2001) As a result, teacher thinking processes have been investigatedthrough such forms as beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, perspectives and implicittheories, to name a few (see S Borg 2003, 2011) Yet, there might be confusionabout these constructs in general and the concept of beliefs in particular becausethe term ‘belief’ has not been used consistently in research In the present study,beliefs are defined by drawing a line between ‘beliefs’ and ‘knowledge’ Instead ofproviding a fixed definition, M Borg (2001) distinguished them based on truth ele-ment Belief, according to him,‘is a mental state which has as its content a proposi-tion that is accepted as true by the individual holding it’ (186) This feature makesbeliefs‘deeply personal’ and ‘not affected by persuasion’ (Pajares 1992, 309) Thus,

as Nespor (1987) noted, belief systems do not require group consensus for theirvalidity On the contrary, knowledge is defined as being true in some externalsense

Beliefs and behaviours

Studies have shown that although teachers may have the same knowledge base,they might follow considerably different teaching methods (Ashari 1994; Ernest1989) What underlies this difference between knowledge and practice is mostlikely the beliefs that teachers hold, as research has indicated that beliefs have animpact on teacher judgments and classroom behaviours (Pajares 1992) Compared

to knowledge, beliefs are stronger predictors of teacher practices since in difficultsituations, for instance,‘cognitive and information processing strategies do not work

… , and the teacher is uncertain of what information is needed or what behaviour

is appropriate’ (Pajares 1992, 311) To examine relationships between beliefs andpractices more closely, Breen et al (2001) conducted a study with 18 AustralianESL (English as a second language) teachers, revealing that these teachers’ behav-iours were identifiable with a set of principles, illustrating the reflexivity of beliefs

in teaching practices Similarly, Cundale’s (2001) study involving two languageteachers in Mexico showed that their beliefs in CLT were corroborated in theirquestioning practices in the class

However, research also indicates that teachers’ beliefs are often inconsistent withtheir actual classroom behaviours, especially in the case of teachers who have justbegun their teaching careers (see Basturkmen 2012 for a review) For example,Simmons et al (1999) conducted a three-year longitudinal study involving 161beginning mathematics teachers Using classroom surveys, interviews and classroomobservations, the researchers found that although the participants reported to havefollowed a student-centred approach to teaching, in reality, their practice was stilldominated by teacher-centred methods Thus, the relationships between teachers’beliefs and actual practices do not demonstrate discernible patterns, which promptedBreen et al (2001) to invite more research to explore the relationship betweenteachers’ beliefs and their classroom behaviours The present study was designed toinvestigate these relationships with a focus on questioning practice

Teacher questions and quality questions

Teacher questions are tied to different pedagogical factors such as the teaching text, teachers’ purposes, students’ learning outcomes and corrective feedback.Cohen, Manion, and Morrison (2004) classified teacher questions into three groupsbased on their pedagogical motives They explained that teachers ask questions notonly ‘for cognitive/intellectual reasons (concerning the subject matter of the lesson)but also for emotional/social reasons (to cater for different personalities) and formanagerial reasons (to minimise bad behaviour and to keep students on task)’(Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2004, 238) Also questioning is a multi-stage pro-cess, as described in the framework called Questioning and Understanding toImprove Learning and Thinking (QUILT) (Walsh and Sattes 2005), which includespreparing and presenting questions, prompting and processing student responses,and reflecting on questioning practice The focus of the present study is qualityquestions which are ‘purposeful, engaging and consequential’ (Walsh and Sattes

con-2005, 23) Walsh and Sattes (con-2005, 23) pointed out four characteristics of qualityquestions which: (i) promote one or more carefully defined instructional purposes;(ii) focus on important content; (iii) facilitate thinking at a stipulated cognitive level;and (iv) communicate clearly what is being asked

Promoting instructional purposes

Teacher questions are linked to the instructional context such as recitation anddiscussion (Walsh and Sattes 2005) The former is found in a teacher-frontedclassroom where teachers dominate classroom discourse following the IRE(Initiation-Response-Evaluation) model (Hall 1998) In this case, teacher questionshelp students to review the lesson, check their understanding and provide opportuni-ties for drill and practice In discussion, on the other hand, teachers, as facilitators

or pace-keepers, raise one open-ended question and let students carry on thediscussion Whatever the instructional context, teachers should be clear about thepurposes for asking questions As Crowe and Stanford (2010, 36) asserted, byposing questions for a wide range of purposes, teachers can ‘extend and enrich highlevel critical thinking and learning naturally within their classrooms’

Focusing important content

Teachers are likely to have different perceptions about the content focus of the son (Walsh and Sattes 2005) To categorise the content focus systematically, teacherquestions in this paper are aligned with four kinds of knowledge: factual knowl-edge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and meta-cognitive knowledgeconstituting the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson et al 2001):

les-• Factual knowledge is knowledge of discrete, including isolated content ments like terminologies and specific details

ele-• Conceptual knowledge includes knowledge of theories, models and tions

classifica-• Procedural knowledge includes knowledge of skills and methods to performtasks

• Meta-cognitive knowledge includes strategy use and students’ self-knowledge

of their strengths and weaknesses for task completion

Facilitating thinking

Contrary to the claim that deciding on the content focus is the most difficult part inquestion design (Walsh and Sattes 2005), developing students’ cognitive levelappears to be the most challenging task for Vietnamese teachers in questioningpractice To substantiate this, we may refer to the six cognitive levels (i.e., remem-bering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating) and associatedcognitive processes (e.g., recalling in remembering and planning and producing increating)

Communicating what is being asked

There has been little research on students’ interpretation of teacher questions, butone thing that cannot be denied is the importance of wording and syntax in ques-tions According to Walsh and Sattes (2005, 47), a quality question should be‘clearand concise’ To achieve this aim, teachers must consider the wording of questions

to provide the intended meaning avoiding ambiguity Similarly, in an EFL contextsuch as Vietnam, where the language input is not readily available outside the

classroom, teachers ought to take grammaticality issues into consideration in lating questions.

formu-Beginning teachers and their questioning beliefs and practices

Beginning teachers are those who have less than four years of teaching experience(Tienken, Goldberg, and DiRocco 2010) According to McCann, Johannessen, andRicca (2005, xiii), beginning teachers confront ‘many challenges and difficulties’resulting from their relationships with students, parents, colleagues, and supervisors(see also Farrell 2009) Heavy workload and underdeveloped time managementskills may cause their stress Novice teachers may also have doubts about their con-tent and pedagogical knowledge base In particular, beginning teachers experienceinadequacy of knowledge and thus difficulty in questioning For instance, in theirlongitudinal study, Tienken, Goldberg, and DiRocco (2010) focused on the differ-ences between experienced and novice teachers in terms of the frequency of pro-ductive questions that they asked Ninety-eight participants, including 60experienced and 38 novice teachers, were involved in the research Findings indi-cated that the number of productive questions produced by beginning teachers wassignificantly low Similarly, Burgess’s (2005) study highlighted the weaknesses ofbeginning teachers in questioning He investigated beliefs about effective question-ing in eight major areas including planning questions, wait time, questioning rolesand question types, responsibility for encouraging, asking, showing interest and sus-taining questioning practice Twenty six in-service teachers, 62 pre-service teachers,and 18 teaching assistants participated in the study Data analysis revealed that thegroup with more practice and experience practised the above questioning routinesmore often than their novice counterparts

Focusing on these characteristics, the present study addressed the followingresearch questions:

(1) What are beginning EFL teachers’ beliefs about quality questions?

(2) How can we describe their actual questioning behaviours?

(3) Are beginning EFL teachers’ beliefs about quality questions and their tioning practices congruent?

Data collection instruments

The first research question on teachers’ beliefs about quality questions wasaddressed using an open-ended bilingual (English and Vietnamese) questionnairesurvey consisting of 14 items (see Appendix 1 for the English version) based on

Walsh and Sattes’s (2005) framework of quality questions Next, to explore ers’ actual questioning practices, video recordings of classroom instruction wereused Six ULIS teachers who participated in the survey were requested to recordone 55-minute lesson each The video files were transcribed verbatim and teacherquestions were highlighted in the transcriptions for subsequent analysis.

teach-Data analysis

Fifteen questionnaires were emailed to 15 teachers working at VNU, and 13 ofthem returned the completed questionnaires Ten of the teachers responded to thequestions in English and three questionnaires had responses in Vietnamese, whichwere later translated into English Content analysis was used to analyse the data.Two phases of coding – initial coding and second-level coding (Dörnyei 2007) –were undertaken Initially, keywords in teacher responses were highlighted andgrouped together, following Krippendorff’s (2004, 180) ‘indices and symptoms con-struct’ within which counting frequencies of words, pairs of words, co-occurrences

of symbols, patterns of references, or relationships within texts has indicative tions For instance, teachers may have cited many verbs to denote their purposes ofasking questions, but all of them aimed to elicit students’ response These catego-ries were then aligned with the participants’ teaching philosophy and other back-ground information so that underlying factors influencing teachers’ beliefs andpractices could be uncovered The same procedure was used for the video data.Finally, in order to understand whether there was correspondence between teachers’beliefs about quality questions and their questioning practices, insights generatedfrom the questionnaire data and the classroom video data were compared.Convergences as well as divergences between them were noted and systematicallydemonstrated under each trait of quality questions

func-Findings

The survey as well as classroom observations provided insights into the teachers’questioning practices in the Vietnamese context Five of the six classes videorecorded taught reading lessons while the last one taught listening Both types oflesson had three stages: lead-in, while-task and post-task The lessons were domi-nated by teacher talk in which the number of questions asked varied between 127and 204 in each of the six 55-minute lessons

Teachers’ purposes in asking questions

Teachers’ beliefs

The questionnaire data showed that nine teachers asked questions to check and ble-check students’ memory as well as understanding of both the previous and thecurrent lessons Seven of them wanted to get their students ready before the lesson

dou-by raising their interest, giving them prompts and motivating them to solve lems Only two teachers claimed that their questions aimed to foster students tolearn and think critically

prob-There were a number of factors that drove teachers to set the above purposesfor their questions All of them mentioned lesson objectives as their priority For

example, Mai (all names are pseudonyms) noted: ‘My questions are designed tomake sure the students understand my lessons and are capable to move up.’ Inaddition, two thirds of the teachers noted that they took the institution’s policiesinto consideration in deciding on the purposes of questions, as, for instance, Anhobserved: ‘Sometimes I have to have my students pay more attention to some lan-guage points than the others because they were decided beforehand by the institu-tion to be the focus of the exams.’ On the other hand, Hai indicated a link betweenthe target proficiency level for students and her questioning practice:

For example, the level of proficiency freshmen at my university aim to achieve is B1[Common European Framework of Reference for Languages– CEFR] Thus, I tend toraise questions to check if students understand my teaching points and know what isrequired of them

The impact of the teaching approach/philosophy on questioning was explicitly noted

by six teachers who asserted that their teaching was influenced by CLT Three otherteachers also pointed to CLT, although indirectly, whose questions aimed at creatingcommunicative interactions in the class This is evident from Mai who stated:

‘Questioning is designed to aim at preparing interesting lessons where interactionbetween teacher and students can be clearly witnessed as much as possible.’ Thedominance of this approach was probably due to the fact that they all received thesame education and training from VNU with a strong focus on CLT Apart fromCLT, there were references to the socio-cultural theory (Vygotsky 1978), as five ofthe teachers believed that questions should scaffold students’ learning For instance,

Ha posited that her questions aimed to‘foster her students to speak’ in the class

Actual practices

Observation of teaching practice showed that the teachers asked questions for threemain purposes The first was to highlight important information for students andalmost half of the teachers’ questions were formulated in two parts: the informationthat the teachers wanted to draw students’ attention to and ‘Right/Ok’ at the end.For example, Ha posed the following question to elicit the meaning of ‘crisp’ fromher students:

C R I S P Right? A pack of crisp You know the potato The slice And it is dry.Very thin and dry Slice of potato is crisp, Ok? So that’s it

Second, teacher questions aimed to elicit students’ responses by giving them anopportunity to express their ideas and opinions on various issues In the lead-inpart, the teachers often aroused students’ interest and curiosity by posing such ques-tions as: ‘Do you want to warm up yourself with some music?’ (Nga), or ‘What’sthe theme of today’s lesson?’ (Thi) Predictably, the students frequently answeredthese questions in chorus In the while-task part, the teachers used questions toguide students through the lesson Taking questions as a tool, the teachers scaffold-

ed students step-by-step (see Walsh 2001) so that they could work out theiranswers The following conversation between Ha and her students provides a goodexample:

T: And number 8, the man is trying to buy a car Ok What is the woman’s mendation? The woman’s recommendation? What is her recommendation?

on checking students’ task completion Questions such as ‘Are you ready?’, ‘Haveyou finished?’, and ‘Finished?’ were found in all teachers’ discourses Teacherquestions also checked students’ comprehension of instruction After giving instruc-tions to students, the teachers often asked: ‘Understand?’, ‘Clear?’ and ‘See mypoint?’ to monitor students’ understanding Nevertheless, the teachers were notfound to wait long enough for students’ answers, or even expect to receive stu-dents’ responses but moved on to the next content:

Now I want you to work in four groups Ok? And inside your group you will have tofind out, as many words or expression related to these Understand? Ok, now, first Idecide the groups (Thi)

In the post-task section, some teachers posed questions to stimulate students’higher order thinking, which will be discussed in the cognitive-level section.Finally, teacher questions gave students the recast feedback, which is defined as

‘a reformulation of an incorrect utterance that maintains the original meaning’ (Gassand Selinker 2008, 335) The teachers repeated students’ answers with rising intona-tion so that they might be aware of their mistakes and self-correct, as is evident inthe following extract:

T: Do you know anything about a traditional wedding?

S: Five person carry things from

T: Five people?

S: Ah,five people (Nga)

Relationships between beliefs and practices

The IRE pattern observed in all six classes was congruent with the recitation text deduced from the questionnaire Almost all teacher questions aimed to reinforcestudents’ ability to remember and understand knowledge, which was in line withtheir expressed intentions for posing questions However, their actual questioningpractice was richer and more diverse which often scaffolded students in theirattempts to comprehend and respond to teacher questions Nevertheless, teacherswere not very successful in encouraging interactions among students Contrary totheir intentions, classroom observations indicated the dominance of teacher talk